Friday, September 7, 2012

I can hear something working on a farm somewhere; I can hear
a motorbike, the occasional jet, passing tractors and grain lorries. It’s
tempting to think that history was quiet in comparison.

It wasn’t.

Every year in Quintin there is a celebration of the linen industry that made this
part of Brittany important. During the fête, it’s possible to wander lanes that
are usually hidden behind closed doors.
These were the poor, dark houses where women twisted the threads into a yarn on
a hand-held spindle. They would sit outside as often as possible, in heat and
cold, just for the light. There would have been several women, with their children
around them, chatting, singing, working their fingers for hour upon hour.

We went for a walk (and lunch, naturally) yesterday at Ile
Grande, on the Côte de Granit Rose. It’s a peaceful place. The tide was out,
the seabirds wheeled, and the masts of beached boats chinked in the easterly
breeze. It’s so easy to think that it was always like this, but it wasn’t. This
little island was riddled with stone quarries. In the 14th century,
stone from here built Tréguier
Cathedral. Right up until the 19th century stone was taken out on
barges, loaded at low tide and floated out when it was deep enough to do so.
Men worked with hammers and chisels at the rock in all weathers, and the island
would have resounded with their rhythmic tapping.

Animals lived close to the farms – inside the longhouses, in
the winter months. There would have been axes chopping trees and wood, the
slow turning of soil. This would have been no silent countryside, but a place of
agricultural industry day in, day out.

Times may have changed, but the past can be heard, all over Brittany – in the music.

Breton music echoes the rhythms of the workers who sang the
simple songs as they spun their thread, or as they sat at the end of the day
with the endless tapping of metal on stone still inside their heads. It’s often
a sort of question and answer form – a theme played on one instrument, repeated
on another. In the same way, a woman might sing a few lines, and her neighbour
copy her, along the hidden lanes and back again.

There are bagpipes here, but they are nothing like the
Scottish ones: even though they were really only introduced in the early 19th
century, they have come to sound like Brittany, and at any fête you can almost
guarantee a bagadou – a band of pipers and drummers walking through the streets.
The cornemuse as depicted in medieval church grotesque sculpture is an early
form, and far closer in sound to the Breton version than to Scottish pipes.

The main instrument, though, is the bombarde – the thing
that looks like a clarinet, and sounds medieval. When you hear Breton music
played by a small band of men and women, with a drum, a violin, and a bombarde,
you hear it in your feet. You want to dance. You know the tune after a couple
of verses, and you hum along.

There are so many fêtes in Brittany, all through the year,
all with their own history to honour – linen weavers, onion growers, horse
traders, fishermen. At every one of them, you will have the old music and the
dancing of people in costume; black based, heavily embroidered jackets (and it
was often the men who did the embroidery), lace head-dresses. There are clubs
where you can learn the steps, in many towns and villages.

I don’t know what it is: the Celt ancestry? The working day,
the need to get through by any means possible, whilst counting the hours in
verses? The hills, where you can’t see the next clustered farm, and each one
was a little hamlet all to itself?

Whatever it is, it’s still there, and it still calls.

History sounds like toes tapping, hands clapping, and a
bombarde, piercing, slightly raucous, and heart-stirring, as a band passes
through a stone-built street. It’s the sound of the people who worked with
their hands and their backs, and who still had a need and the time for music.

It’s a question and an answer in the same song: yesterday and today. It’s Brittany.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The schools go back on Tuesday; the shops are full of mothers trying to decide which really is the best calculator,
and not the one Child wants because Best Friend has the same model. The mannequins
in the clothes stores are wearing wool and raincoats and boots. The colours
have turned dark.

July was wet and ruined the tourist trade’s balance sheets.
Now, you have to wonder at people not coming to Brittany because it was
raining. If you are going to choose the far north-west of France, the bit that
sticks out into the Atlantic, for your main holiday of the year, you know to
bring your umbrella. Apparently the financial squeeze made people demand more
for their money: sunshine, or the deal’s off. It rained; they stayed at home
and sulked.

I never really got the
French grandes vacances until this
year. Down south, where half the time we huddled behind closed shutters,
fanning ourselves and mopping our brows with wet flannels, we didn’t really see
any tourists. They were either at the beach, near La Rochelle, or in private
villas with pools. The roads remained quiet.

Here there are beaches a-plenty, and events organised for every
day of the week. There are music festivals – Les Grandes Charrues, which draws
people like Bob Dylan, and 180,000 spectators, and Le Petit Village, a couple
of kilometres from here, where they have all manner of French artists. 8000
people turned up, and we never heard a thing. Sea-shanty festivals at the
coast, rock, pop, punk, folk, jazz , classical – it’s all here.

There are the son et
lumières at ruined abbeys like Bon Repos, and night-time hikes. There’s
walking chest-high through the water across the Bay of St Brieuc. There are
cycle races, and old car races. Our next village had a speed trial and hill climb
round the fields of maize and up the roads and through the farms. (We didn’t
hear that either.)This weekend there is a vintage car race round St Brieuc
itself – Model T Fords and Porsches and anything in between.

It’s been an amazing summer. It’s been so hot that I
couldn’t sit up here under the roof to work.We’ve lived in shorts and tee shirts, which we never did down south,
where covering up was the name of the game. I even dug out my swimsuit. (Rather
like having a wasp in the room, I like to know where it is. I may not do
anything about it, but I feel one should keep one’s enemy in the sights.)

Today, I am back in cardigan, long trousers, and a scarf to
keep my neck warm. It’s as though the weather’s giving a nudge to the rentrée, a little kindness to say that
it’s time to stop playing now, and get back to work and school. Our Parisian
neighbours had a wonderful month, with lots of visitors staying, getting fit
and tanned and happy. They went back last weekend, in the rain.

So now Brittany is ours again. There are still foreign cars
around – English, German, Belgian, and some from other départements, but in the next few weeks, they will wander off home,
too. The beaches will be empty though the sea will be warm; no-one will be
there to see me in my swimsuit, should I be so brave as to put it on.

There will still be music: this is Brittany , and music is
what we do. There will be more festivals all through the year, whatever the weather,
because there always have been.

It feels like the end of something. It feels like the start
of Autumn. Now it’s time for the ones who are left behind, when the tourists
fade away, to make the most of what we’ve got, just for ourselves.

The bright, noisy, excited visitors have left us, and we
will sit back and enjoy the quiet once more.

Maybe I’ll just tuck the swimsuit back into its drawer. It
wouldn’t be fair to disturb the peace.

About Me

Moved to France in 2004, to the Vienne. Moved up to Brittany in 2010, to renovate a couple of houses and a cottage. I write an online advice column, and fiction, and cook sustaining food,whilst he who does everything around here slaves over a hot drill, chainsaw, router, trowel, cable, ladder....